Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
brickfanatics.comAs others have noted, they still have an education focused robotics set, it’s just not called Mindstorms: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-education-spike-prim...
As a now-successful robotics engineer, I was the target age when the first Lego mindstorms set came out. Due to the cost it had to be a combined birthday and Christmas present (still obviously very privileged). The simple scratch-like programming system that kit used was great for me as a tween learning robotics.
Today I am designing an open source farming robot as a non profit project! (See my profile)
The early history of Lego Mindstorms is interesting. I didn’t realize Seymour Papert was involved but that makes a lot of sense! Especially with the name Mindstorms:
FYI if you want to get beefy on the compute side, they make a raspberry pi HAT for integration with the lego spike stuff: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/build-hat/
Now if only they made a Raspberry Pi for purchase...
I have 4xRaspberry Pi 4 8 GB for sale from Sweden if you’re interested in buying!
As I grown man who has built actual robots with all the skills to do embedded programming and mechanical engineering to make robots... I'm still envious of Mindstorms and yet never purchased any despite having the funds to do so.
I think this is the same part of my brain that still thinks getting a PDA is a good idea despite having had a smartphone for I don't know how many years now.
Is there a word for holding on to a desire which has entirely been satisfied with new but different solutions?
I’m not sure what’s the word is, but whatever it is constantly tries to convince me that I need an iPod Classic.
Aesthetic nostalgia maybe
Nostalgia?
I say embrace it.
I never had a computer as a kid in the 90s. But I would go to electronics stores and play around with PCs - my most vivid memory was the large white and grey keyboards.
I now own a very expensive, large, white and grey keyboard :) (Leopold FC980C for you keyboard fans).
Was going to say the same thing. Worst case you buy it and it doesn't do what you need (itch) and in that case you can gift it to someone.
I think the design decisions can be educational. I'm sure mindstorms is full of compromises required to get a product to market under a certain price point (etc).
I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but I get that too.
FOMO?
Gadget consumerism.
The Spike system seems like an odd side-step to me. There are some minor improvements, but not really enough to justify breaking compatibility and making people repurchase everything from scratch.
In contrast, Mindstorms replaced the old LEGO/Logo system (which I was fortunate to use in high school), and was a big step forward in a number of ways most noticeably that you didn't have to be tethered to the computer.
Just to clarify, Mindstorms has had many iterations. I believe what you're referring to is Mindstorms 1.0 (RCX). It's had three successors in the past 20 years or so - NXT, EV3, and most recently, RIS.
The most recent iteration is based on SPIKE Prime. It's the same hub, but with slightly different firmware. The motors are and sensors are the same but in different colors.
All Mindstorms iterations (including the most recent) are untethered. As is SPIKE Prime.
Essentially this announcement is that they are discontinuing the consumer-facing branding, but continuing with the education product, SPIKE Prime. Both products are actually identical, minus a few firmware differences. The number of motors and sensors included in the box also differed.
I love Legos and by extension the company that makes them, and I still believe what you are saying, that everyone will have to buy new stuff, is exactly the reason the LEGO company is making this choice. They don't make a penny (unless they are somehow involved in a secondary market which probably has much lower margins and higher costs) unless you buy something new, and migrating to a new ecosystem makes so much sense if that's the goal.
Did you know that today's LEGO bricks are compatible with bricks manufactured in 1975?
There is no "migrating" here. LEGO correctly noted that Mindstorms was not very popular with the consumer market, and too complicated for the education market, so Prime is a vastly simpler product that's more accessible from education.
Lego Technics motors, battery packs, remote controls, etc. from a few years ago are incompatible with the current ones, because they decided they wanted to raise the prices across the board and tie everything to smart phone apps.
They are, but unlike in 1975, LEGO now makes it very difficult for people to actually buy just bricks. They won't sell plain packs of bricks to shops unless they buy large numbers of the themed sets.
I used to buy Technix sets (sp?) and spend days playing with gear and pulley and wheel and motor systems. I don't think a single time in all my childhood did I ever sit down with a Lego set and build some themed toy that they suggested on the box.
All I really want is bricks, plates, shafts, couplers, gears, pulleys, motors, sensors, and assorted things. I'll come up with the projects myself. They don't seem to want people like me, since I have not been able to buy that kind of kit since the 80s.
Try some old Meccano.
I great up in the 1980s loving lego, and you couldn't buy just bricks then.
OTOH now you can get https://www.amazon.com.au/LEGO-Classic-10717-Bricks-Piece/dp... very easily (and there are smaller sets that cost a lot less too)
In the USA, you could definitely buy plain bricks in the 1970s. Probably the early to mid 80s, too, but I can’t be certain.
But unlike 1975, anyone who wants can buy plain packs online.
> unless they are somehow involved in a secondary market
LEGO owns BrickLink, as of a few years ago.
Didn't Lego recently buy BrickLink? So they do own the secondary market, in a fairly real sense.
The latest Mindstorms is literally just Spike Prime with slightly different firmware.
And no colors :-(
> not really enough to justify breaking compatibility and making people repurchase everything from scratch
That’s LEGO’s game plan though X)
EV3 was largely compatible with NXT, and while NXT wasn't directly compatible with RIS they sold separate adapter modules. 51515 was a huge regression compared to the rest of the series.
The general LEGO system has also had decades of compatibility at this point...
I don't know if thats true. Lego as a corporation has been fairly low on the fuckery index.
LEGO kits used to be composed of fully interchangeable parts. While that is still true of the core build, there are now unique parts in every kit. This is driven by sales.
Nearly all of the parts are designed around a small set of common interfaces. The main change is that have moderately increased the number of interfaces vs. a few decades ago and there are more small decorative parts (and thus higher overall part counts) in most large current sets.
Designing models that are comparable to the first-party models is a more difficult challenge for kids than it used to be, but there is also a much larger pool of extremely skilled builders than there used to be (both adults and children). But there’s nothing stopping anyone from using the current pieces in older-style projects, and the older pieces couldn’t be used in quite as large a variety of models as the current ones.
Because people like them. And the unique parts are compatible with other kits.
I can trace my success as a software engineer to the 'too big' presents my parents bought me for xmas/birthday. I had a desktop computer of my own as 10 year old in 1992, and a laptop, a Powerbook 190 with a 16 grayscale screen, in 1995. A 33.6k modem also in 1995 (and a second phone line because my parents got sick of me tying up the main line).
I only had these things because my parents recognised my interests and bought things that were WAAAY too big for birthdays/xmas.
Same for me. And I keep this in mind when trying to help or trying to not be judgemental of people who are less fortunate than myself.
I don’t understand the Mindstorms pricing:
- Even you as a privilege background, you had to join Birthday and Christmas,
- If a Raspberry Pi costs $30, why would each single motor at Lego cost $25? Why can’t we have an excellent Mindstorms set for $200?
It looks just like segmentation and extracting the dollar fro where it is, but wouldn’t the market be much bigger if it were a little more affordable?
As long as you went to MIT, majored in mechatronics, and made a 3-legged pogo bot, it's all good. :)
I had the conflagration of about 25 LEGO sets prior to Mindstorms. Perhaps that caused me to head over to EE/CS? I did have Big Trak though that could fire frickn laser beams. :)
Yup combined Christmas and birthday presents and additionally forfeit any money I received from relatives back in the year 2000. Had to fight for it and made to feel guilty on how much it cost.
Didn’t become a robotics engineer.
Not many sleeps to go before the end of the year.
NASA has a kit for building a model of the robot probes they send to land and drive on Mars. It was priced about three thousand dollars before inflation struck.
My kid was selected into the robotics club this year, and they are using the Spike Prime kit. Seems like a decent set all things considered for younger kids. My child is in 5th grade and first year robotics. Probably wouldn't invest into it if your child is middle-school or older, but from what I've seen of it a very good kit.
At what age is it appropriate? My kid is going to be 5 soon and loves playing with Legos. Thanks
5 is more than old enough. Basically any time after they stop putting things into their mouths.
5 is appropriate for Lego, but in my experience from volunteering at a teach-kids-to-code club, is almost always to young for programming. If only because they can't read yet, but also their eye for detail (I have seen two 7-year olds spend 10 minutes and still not see the difference between "Step();" and "Step()" when these two lines were right below each other).
Man I wish I had a robotics club growing up x)
https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc
Anyone who wants to see that happen for their children can get a robotics club added to their school. Tons of fun, not very expensive. Pretty easy to get corporate sponsorship.
Kids love it.
What would you recommend to kinds these days?
Spike Prime is the replacement, and it’s been a nice upgrade for us
I had some fun with this device - https://shop.m5stack.com/collections/m5-hobby/products/rover... - the general platform is geared more towards IoT, sensors and what you can do with software, but perhaps that's even a more relevant direction than just motion.
I was looking for a Christmas present robot kit for my 8 year old and still on the fence between mindstorms or the makeblock robots. (The Codey Rockey in particular, but the mbot looks really nice too)
I have colleagues that organize coserdojo sessions for young kids fully centered on the makeblock robots. You can program them in scratch to get started, but a push of the button gives you the equivalent Python code once the kids graduate from scratch.
I am surprised to see Lego cancel mindstorms, but it does make the decision easier…
Generally arduino, or raspberry pi. Learning to light up an LED and move a servo motor, plus read some kind of sensor are great ways to start to see how code can interact with the real world.
Make Twitter bots :)
There is a different feeling when programming things in the physical world, especially if you only programmed digital creatures before :) Give it a try if you haven't, Lego is a great non-intimidating way of getting into it, otherwise Arduino is pretty simple for programmers to grok as well.
I forgot how early Lego went with controlled electromechanics. Even before mindstorms they had some kind of electromechanical drawing board.
It costs 385 USD !!
Whoa !
I wish there were cheaper alternatives. I'm from India, and it costs about 800 USD here, for the same set.
FYI, your site seems down (12:40am PST)
I got the original Lego Mindstorms 1.0 kit for my 8th birthday - there was no programming interface, just a way to select one of 256 possible sequences of high-level actions the robot would perform in a loop. I paid for my first car by working at summer camps that taught kids how to use the Mindstorms 2.0 and NXT, and built my first 3D printer with Lejos (https://lejos.sourceforge.io/), Lego Technic parts and a tiny spindle router that could sculpt shapes into floral foam.
While I'm saddened by this news for nostalgic reasons, I personally believe that today's young learners are better served by the proliferation of hobby robotics platforms like Arduino/Raspberry Pi. Every summer camp I worked at would claim that Lego robotics teaches real-world engineering skills, while in reality the students were just happy to stay within the comfort zone of playing with Legos and using a block-based programming environment (one that has quite frankly gone from bad to worse to absolutely horrible with each product cycle). Also, FIRST Lego League does nothing meaningful to prepare students for FIRST - when I donated supplies and a few weeks of mentorship to my former high school's FIRST team, I was dismayed to see how much dead weight the team was carrying in students who participated in the middle school Lego league, who did not have even the basic coding/engineering skills to make any contribution to the high school team other than paying the membership dues.
> I got the original Lego Mindstorms 1.0 kit for my 8th birthday - there was no programming interface, just a way to select one of 256 possible sequences of high-level actions the robot would perform in a loop.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the Robotics Discovery Set? The blue brick? It had a bunch of predefined things you could stitch together to make little programs directly via the brick's interface.
RIS 1.0 definitely had a programming interface via the serial IR tower.
You're right! It was the blue brick with the pre-defined programs.
> how much dead weight the team was carrying in students who participated in the middle school Lego league, who did not have even the basic coding/engineering skills to make any contribution to the high school team other than paying the membership dues
That kind of just sound like middle school. The clubs and sports I was involved in were things I was very bad at.
It sounds a lot like college and school as a whole for me. I was in a top 5 CS program, too. Entering the workforce was the first time I felt empowered by the team dynamic. Quite possibly this is where imposter syndrome comes from. Maybe I’ve progressed to my maximum level of incompetence where I am now the deadweight.
I never thought of it this way.
6 years in and many people around me look up to and/or respect me and I always feel like they're making a horrible choice.
I'm referring to the FIRST robotics competition for high school students - it is normally an afterschool activity, and most high schools in the Bay Area have a team. The team was open for anyone to join, but only the handful of students who were actually interested in participating would join.
I joined FIRST with very high hopes - I had been programming in C++ for several years by the time I reached high school, and had built small robots at home (and also participated in our middle school Lego robotics team).
I quit after two months. Our team was dominated completely by the engineer parents/mentors and a couple of "wunderkind" (aka children of the engineer parents). Outside of the select few, most people were completely brushed off and just sat in an empty room dicking around. The parents were too competitive and did a lot of the work, the stakes were too high for them, so failure wasn't allowed, so nobody learned anything. You either joined an expert or were "dead weight".
I also had the original mindstorms set from 1996-98, the compute module was the big yellow brick (i think the RCX), you interface with it via a little serial IO tower. There was absolutely a programming interface. It was visual and very scratch like and it was evolved eventually into the programming environment that came with the ev3. It did require a pc to use I think there was a cdrom in the box that contained the software.
Since you mentioned the raspberry pi, you can use one of those with the latest lego spike system as well via a pi HAT: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/build-hat/
To me as a kid and well as someone a bit older who often pulls out legos to mock up mechanical systems before I dig into solidworks the programming of the robot was a bit secondary to getting the mechanics worked out, and legos are a super fast way to prototype a lot of things (though they do have their limitations for sure). While I'm not one for shielding young people from serious tools, a school or a summer camp might for insurance reasons, lego might still be the way to go.
Totally agree with you on the benefits of Legos as a rapid prototyping tool, which is certainly an impulse I have as well. My concern is that a lot of kids get stuck on the Lego Mindstorms toy model of things, and aren't exposed to anything else. I actually used to run summer camps to teach about technology, and the main issue I faced with teaching serious tools was finding/training the instructors.
Kids, right? How dare they not know everything before they are taught!
I was there to teach them, the problem was most of them didn't have the intrinsic motivation to learn. Everyone was excited to be assigned some work, but only a handful of students actually went through and finished the tasks they were given, while most were content to simply get on their phone or play an online game.
A decade ago, I was a student on the team, and I remember everyone doing a lot more with a lot less. We had to program microcontrollers with Stamp BASIC, pull reference books off the shelf, and go on epic debugging journeys. The team today was overall far less motivated, although the exceptional programming/technical skills of certain students was unlike anything we had 10 years ago, and it was this handful of students that pulled the entire team forward.
One time a parent of a notoriously lazy student asked me how they were doing, and I answered honestly that their kid doesn't do anything but play games on the Internet, and they would be better off using their after-school hours playing a sport or literally doing anything else. What followed was a vile and vitriolic rant about how their kid was the leader of the Lego robotics team, and maybe it's because you aren't assigning them the right work, and on and on. Just one decade ago, students can and did get kicked off the team for being lazy, but you can't deny anyone an opportunity these days...
Everything is so accessible now that the kids with a desire to learn do so at a rate that far exceeds anything possible with some computer magazines and a shitty implementation of BASIC, which was all some people had when they were kids back in the day.
Of course, that means that the kids that did end up programming back then were self-selected to be really motivated. If not, they wouldn't have done it. There's a serious selection bias if you're looking at kids who programmed then and now, the population of programming children is much larger (and much more average) than it was decades ago.
>What followed was a vile and vitriolic rant about how their kid was the leader of the Lego robotics team, and maybe it's because you aren't assigning them the right work, and on and on.
The quality of American parenting has taken a big nose-dive in 10 years...
raspberry pi is not a real product anymore
Sad to see this as someone who enjoyed these as a kid and entering robotics competitions based off of them; hopefully the new products will keep the spirit alive.
There was even some decent FOSS tooling that developed on top of Mindstorms: I used NXC (Not eXactly C, https://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/welcome.html) which was a C-like language for programming Lego Mindstorms. It looks like the last release of NXC was in 2011.
Similar story here. I remember getting my first exposure to embedded development at a relatively young age through brickOS (https://brickos.sourceforge.net/), which was a complete replacement operating system for the original Mindstorms RCX (predating the NXT).
That version of the hardware was so old that it didn't even have non-volatile storage. Every time you changed the batteries, it would boot into a minimal ROM bootloader which was just powerful enough to download the rest of the firmware into RAM, via an infrared connection to your PC. That had the nice side effect of making the RCX very hacker-friendly, because it was almost impossible to permanently "brick" it (ha!).
My first real programming was NQC (Not Quite C, probably related to NXC?). I owe it my programming abilities.
Lego Mindstorms was one of the best creative learning tools you can give a child; my life started the day I stopped using the building manual and started building my own stuff by trial and error.
The world would be a better place if everyone grew up with the opportunities that I did. I wish schools would just let children do whatever with Lego instead of filling your day with restrictive lessons in loud classrooms.
I grew up using mindstorms in FLL and I just began coaching a team this year. I'm pretty impressed with the new Spike Prime, and although it has its quirks, over all I'd say it's a good improvement over the last generation, plus I get to teach the kids python which has honestly been a blast!
Pybrick/python runs well on both Mindstorms EV3 and the new thing (Spike Prime).
Mindstorms has a long compelling history before LEGO, that includes cybernetics, the Logo programming language, turtle graphics, Braitenberg vehicles, and the rise of the MIT Media Lab.
See the book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" by Seymour Papert. Free from MIT.
https://mindstorms.media.mit.edu
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics
That's somewhat bittersweet. The company I now work for and lead was inspired by mindstorms. Our founder had written a DOS based software for alarm receiving centers. Even back then he and his prime customer were unsatisfied with the restricting logic of managing alarms by only having a few choices how to react to an alarm. Usually show some text, and have a person call someone and then write up a protocol. So he build some sort of programming environment for alarm receiving software.
Now they could implement individual alarm workflows for their customers. But that was still nothing his customers could use themselves, because they still would have to know how to program.
But then he saw an ad for mindstorms in the Lego catalogue his son brought home from the toy store. That inspired him to write a completely new software. Windows based with a their own graphical programming environment embedded.
Bittersweet‽ What's the sweet part of Lego discontinuing Mindstorms?
I'm not sure if bittersweet is the right word, english is not my first language. But I think the bitterness of Mindstorms ending reminding me of the beginnings of our company could be considered sweet. So I would say it's a bittersweet moment.
I have to admit, though, I never used Mindstorms and as far as I know he never bought mindstorms for his children either. ;)
They're likely shifting focus to a different programmable block product line, namely SPIKE Prime. So it's more of a changing of the guard than the end of robotic educational LEGO.
That might be okay; what's that like?
> That said, SPIKE Prime is effectively LEGO Education’s implementation of MINDSTORMS, so it’s tricky to envision how the two platforms could co-exist under a single banner.
And SPIKE web app[0,1] does not work in Firefox:
> Browser not supported
> Use Google Chrome to access the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ App.
[0] https://education.lego.com/en-us/downloads/spike-app/softwar...
I scoff at this message every time. We're back at "This website requires Netscape Navigator 4.0"
You're not kidding. They've outright blocked Firefox.
I wonder what programs like FIRST Lego League will do. That was an amazing experience for my kid.
LEGO Spike Prime
School & independent teams have spent $$$ buying lego parts and it is still sad to see things deprecated when they could have easily upgraded the "cpu" and kept things compatible.
Spike Prime and 51515 (the final Mindstorms generation) seem to be basically the same thing (which isn't new, back in the NXT times you had NXT and NXT Education Edition).
I'd be very surprised if they weren't compatible with each other.
They aren't compatible.
https://www.lego.com/en-in/service/help/spike_prime/spike-es...
That page only mentions the long-discontinued NXT and EV3, not 51515 (the set that the article says is being discontinued now). 51515 wasn't compatible with NXT/EV3 either.
Although they claim to not be abandoning the idea and the trademark altogether, I don't really understand the reasoning behind not using such a seemingly strong brand. Mindstorms appeared pretty popular with hobbyists and in education.
MBA thinking, probably.
I have many fond memories of Mindstorms...
In college I started out a math major. The first CS class I took was a robotics class based on Mindstorms, as a sophomore. I remember it was restricted to only juniors and seniors, but it sounded cool, and I found a bug in the course registration system that let me sign up anyway.
It was a great class. It's fun that in computer science there are so many different ways to solve your problems. Within the year I was getting bored of mathematics, and all I really wanted to do was take more CS classes....
> I found a bug in the course registration system that let me sign up anyway.
Hah, that’s an awesome filter… if I ever start a college, signing up for any 200+ level CS class will require spoofing a POST request.
The bug here was more mundane, that the registration process went like:
1. Choose your individual classes, which reserves a spot for you
2. Click the overall "Finalize your class selection"
3. All validations run, including both things like "are you taking the right number of credits" and "do you meet the prerequisites for each class"
Classes that were restricted to juniors and seniors opened up to everyone if they didn't fill up by the start of the semester. So I chose my classes and didn't finalize until the semester started. Muahaha.
In the modern era this is typically solved via these "your cart will only reserve your items for 15 minutes" type warnings, but back in the olden days when I was an undergrad, that level of technology wasn't widespread yet.
This is sad. Lego Mindstorms played a huge role in my life trajectory. I discovered RCX and NXT in middle school, absolutely loved building stuff with them and went to robotics competitions.
It got me really interested in robotics to the point where I decided I would move halfway across the world for college to get educated further in robotics. I did that and I am now a professional roboticist. None of that would’ve happened if it wasn’t for Lego Mindstorms. Sad to see it go. Their spike prime kit looks way too basic compared to how mature and extensible the mindstorms ecosystem is.
I also entered a Mindstorms competition at my school and it had a similar impact on me. To this day I look back on that competition as one of my best childhood memories and I think it was a large part of why I went on to eventually study computer science.
I suspect there are many of us out there... A very sad day indeed.
I’ve always wanted to jump into these, but our family was never in the most financially secure situation back then.
I’ve long had this hope of getting a Mindstorms set and working on it with my daughters someday (4 and 6).
Can they at least open source all the CAD so we can 3D print these suckers?
> 3D print these suckers?
Famously, LEGO has an extremely tight manufacturing tolerance that's around 10um [1]. Your 3d printer is much better than mine. :)
1. Page 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego#cite_ref-Companyprofile_3...
Currently 3D printinga lot of Lego rail on my FDM printer. Although not perfect, it does snap onto original rail and to its 3D printed peers. Lego pieces do snap to the dimples as well, although too tight.
Main use case for me is to lay some track between rooms for kid's trains.
I have made compatible parts with my at home FDM printer.
I have too on my TAZ, but they either require a bunch of sanding to get the fit right or they are far too loose. I wonder if the tolerances on the resin printers are accurate enough.
extrusion tolerances can be tuned very finely on an FDM printer if you're using a geared extruder head and a well-tuned profile with a well known filament.
very high end FDM printers have been getting down to sub 100 micron dimensional accuracy for many years now.
if you're sanding parts you probably have some low-hanging-fruit to eat tuning wise.
SLA printer could do it, they even mention using it for prototyping on the wiki page
With SLA resin at $90 a liter, I don't know much much money you'd actually save.
Probably not as tough as Lego though
RIP My Robotics professor developed ROBOLAB with Lego + LabView. In return, Lego funded part of the robotics department. We had the most amazing Lego lab. Bins of every shape piece you could ask for. It was really a childhood dream come to life.
When they first announced the Mindstorms kit, I was obsessed with the idea, but we were a Mac family. My parents somehow obtained a Robolab kit from the Lego educational catalog, which did run on Mac. I had so many good memories of building with that kit, but there were a number of plans I had found for Mindstorms that uses parts not included with the Robolab kit.
When I was in a freshman engineering class that used version 1 mindstorms kits a few years later, my fellow students were amazed at my understanding of how to build with the kits. It also help with another lab used LabVIEW.
ROBOLAB was great.
I fondly remember the Mindstorms RIS 2.0 set my parents got me for Christmas in 2001. It was the starting point of my fascination with and eventual love of computers. I'm sad to see it go (although it does live on sort of as Spike).
-- Remainder of comment is a personal story --
Using this thing my dad gave me access to called "the World Wide Web", I eventually learned that people were making custom sensors for the RCX like distance sensors and proximity sensors.
The first website I found is still up 20+ years later and the design is delightfully unchanged (https://www.philohome.com/sensors.htm, https://www.philohome.com/mindstorms.htm)
Trying to follow these projects eventually led me to become frustrated with the block environment and I arrived at something called NQC (Not-Quite-C). It's a C-like language/environment for the RCX stock firmware.
Wait, stock, there are other firmwares??
Then I learned about something called "lejos" (a Java VM for Mindstorms) through a MacWorld magazine my dad left laying around, which is how I ended up starting to learn Java.
Next thing I picked up was the BASIC Stamp through the Parallax Boebot kit.
I eventually started going to a local robotics club (Chibots), which exposed me to even more stuff. One member was trying to start a business making AVR eval boards for hobbyists and gave me a few samples, which is how I picked up AVRs (Arduino was still a few years away). His website went offline a few years ago. Hope he's doing alright.
He and most of the club were using an environment for AVR called BASCOM AVR, which feels a lot like VB6, but for AVR. I couldn't afford the $80 it cost as a kid, so I ended up learning C because avr-gcc was free and open source software, which eventually let me to Linux and more.
Being a kid was fun, but I always had trouble relating to the other kids :)
A fantastic feature of Lego Mindstorms is that they provided developer kits for both hardware and software, including schematics, datasheets, and source code. It was really fun to build a custom motor controller board which interfaced with Mindstorms, just because their open interface and information made it simple. Sad to see it go - hoping that their new offerings keeps the hacking alive.
https://education.lego.com/en-us/product-resources/mindstorm...
Any alternatives that anyone could suggest for young children looking to get an introduction to robotics?
Spike Prime is their new education branding. This article is kind of misleading since they've been sort of phasing out the Mindstorms branding in favor of a broader education initiative for a while. Spike Prime might not be for very young children, but I'd say a precocious 2nd or 3rd grader could definitely program it.
I'm looking at their Spike Prime stuff now, and nothing I'm finding seems that... interesting? I got my start in programming with the Mindstorms NXT set (this thing: http://www.robotreviews.com/reviews/lego-mindstorms-nxt-8527...), where you got all the parts and instructions needed to build a walking, programmable lego robot. The Spike Prime set looks like... some motors, some sensors, the controller brick, and some parts, but nothing to inspire, no instructions for a cool bipedal robot build, or robot arm, or anything to get the imagination flowing.
Even the bright colors look like something that's designed to educate small kids? The old sets had a "cool" vibe to them. Maybe that made them too gendered, but as a young boy, it certainly helped avoid the shame of "still" playing with lego.
Am I missing something, or does this Spike Prime thing look like less of a replacement and more of a completely different product with a different focus which also just happens to contain programmable lego motors?
It's more geared towards organized lessons or competitions. In something like FLL, kids are given problems to solve on a board (move this from here to there, trigger this mechanism, etc) and they need to use the robot to solve it. So they are not building bipedal robots but tools geared toward a specific "mission" (an FLL term). When my kid did it the team needed to do everything, including building the robot, and needed to collaborate since generally each member of the team had a mission and the robot needed to do all of them in a certain time. This often meant returning home, swapping out an attachment and starting again, so a design that was quickly modified on the board was an advantage.
It's all arguably less fun, but certainly easier to sell to institutions designing curriculum.
EDIT: One thing I want to add is that though I also played with technic, I saw FLL attract kids who wouldn't otherwise be attracted to STEM because FLL had a social aspect. I felt it was a great way of introducing kids to robotics and programming because they could do it with friends and work towards some goal. I loved technic, but it was a solo pursuit and though that worked for me, it doesn't work for everyone. So when I say Spike is "less fun", I mean that it probably doesn't attract the kid who wants to build a robot, but it certainly did work in bringing in kids who would never play with technic at all.
Right, that seems plausible to me. That confirms my impression that Spike fills a completely different niche than Mindstorms, and that the people who would get into programming and/or mechanical engineering through Mindstorms won't through Spike. That's a bit sad IMO.
I'm a bit out of touch with FLL (my kids aged out), but its not surprising. Little of winning a FLL competition is related to the robotic performance. The team that wins the robotic portions won't necessarily do well overall.
Given that, and the sophistication of many of the teams, and the way the competitions are designed. The best teams are usually just doing some form of preprogrammed dead reckoning sequence and getting a bit lucky and rigorously placing the bot at the beginning.
AKA, while the NXT/EV3/etc devices are capable of sensor feedback, few teams made use of it. Its likely all the FLL teams need for most of the competition is three motor forward/reverse.
PS: Maybe I sorta failed to respond to the main point, which is that the spike kits aren't there to be "cool" sitting on the shelf and excite kids who get them under the tree. They are mostly purchased by educational/FLL teams where the build instructions and/or goals are provided by a 3rd party.
Using sensors in the robotic competition was unreliable. A simple change in lighting from your development set to the competition board would screw everything up. I thought FLL was great, but as a robotics competition it's actually harder in some ways than the higher FIRST competitions because lego's are small and very finnicky.
Yes, Spike is brick, not Technic. It's for robotic cars, not machinery.
Spike is mostly technic, including the newer large frames.
As a child I had a total blast building and programming things with Fischertechnik: https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/playing/robot-toys
You have microswitches, photoelectric and magnetic sensors, motors and pneumatic actuators to name a few. It all came with a software to program it all in a flowchart like fashion.
I fondly remember unpacking a set at christmas and playing with it. Honestly, I think Fischertechnik had a huge impact on me and put me on the career path that I am now. While my last experience with Fischertechnik is more than a decade ago, the website seems like they haven't lost their spirit
Started with Fischertechnik as well. The "Computing" set came out before LEGO Mindstorms. The flowchart programming tool was called "Lucky Logic", but it could also be programmed in C.
Here is how it looked like: https://fischertechnik-blog.de/2022/09/26/welche-kindheitstr...
'Mindstorm' are more suited for over 10 yo children. For younger children the 'Boost' line (17101 set) may be a good choice (there is nothing said about it in the announcement). Also there is plenty of chinese clones of the previous generations of Mindstorm (and maybe the reason for the discontinuation).
Fischertechnik - Basically the direct competitor to Lego Technics. At least in Germany.
There is Fischertechnik, a German brand. Don't know how common it is outside Germany. It's pretty close to "real" robotics/construction.
I'm aware of it... and its one of the "when I get my desk lego things done, I'll get one of them to play with" - https://www.fischertechnik.de/en/products/simulating/trainin... has been particularly tempting.
The factory must grow into real space.
I had tremendous success teaching 7-9 year olds with Piper (https://www.playpiper.com/). It is trivially easy to add moving parts and teach the core concepts of electronics, but the box itself is not great as a robotics platform. In my particular case, the kids also had access to a laser cutter and CAD software that would automatically generate the 2D shapes and joining slots.
VexIQ is one big competitor
Hummingbird robotics kits are great for creative or STEAM projects
quite a few robotics kits associated with microbit and raspberry pi. Though because they use computers they dont feel like fun so much to me.
Wondering the same.
My very 1st programming experience was on this baby as a ~10yo kid.
http://www.technicopedia.com/8479.html
Still remember how instane it felt.
I remember that when constructing the truck I forgot to add in some gears so the claws didn't rise properly and I had to dissasemble the entire cabin again: my dad almost had to force me to do it because I was constructing it for so long that I was totaly tired and just wanted to be done with the damn thing.
Bummer, I feel like Mindstorms landed right in that gap for me where I was a bit too old for them when they first came out (in high school, already having a blast with web programming), and now I have a two year old who builds giant Duplo castles, has conversations with our household robots, wears robot pajamas, and I'm super excited for them to age into robotics toys.
This SPIKE Prime thing seems neat, but as others have mentioned, a bit bland. Hopefully LEGO comes out with some rad space robot themed sets at some point.
Does anyone know if LEGO has or is working on some sort of Minecraft style environment where you can build cool stuff, and then develop the programs and run them in the simulated environment? Then maybe you can build the machines IRL and run the same code to get the same behavior? Even a single player simulator would be pretty neat, though multiplayer would be ideal. Maybe what I'm hoping for is something like a MuJoCo for kids, and it seems like LEGO would be a perfect match to have a product like that.
Well there's Arduino simulators, and Minecraft education has multiple options for coding (blocks or JavaScript). I don't know about any Lego robot-style simulations, though.
In case anyone cares, there is an open-source Python library for interfacing with Lego Boost/Mindstorms [0]. Last time I checked, it worked quite well with the Boost and needed some minor work with the actual Mindstorms hub.
Part of the problem is Lego is horrible for robotics. It's very hard to build complex mechanical systems in Lego. It's also degenerating; newer kits are less and less creative (kids follow instructions and build models, rather than creative inventing).
The kits I use with my child are Engino Discovering STEM. Each kit lets you build a bunch of interesting, complex mechanical systems. It's not just a little better than Lego; it's in a different class for building robotic systems. It's also a lot cheaper.
What it needs, though, is a competent software platform. I'd love to have this integrated with something like the BBC Micro:bit.
My general feeling is that Lego is in cash cow mode. A lot of money flowing in, but weakening fundamentals.
Lego is horrible for bots cos the stuff comes apart. Go with metal kits with screws.
I was introduced to Lego Mindstorms while programming on the Apple II in elementary school. It was a fun way to let kids that were a little on the nerdy side get to try some new things.
We did things like write security systems (beam cross triggered alarms), or make little cars.
It was called "Lego LOGO" at the time, I believe. (confirmed: http://lukazi.blogspot.com/2014/07/lego-legos-first-programm...)
Don't worry hackers. Lego has a long history of integrating with computers. This isn't their first attempt and won't be the last.
Cue a few hundred nostalgia posts. Mindstorms was an amazing learning experience in the 00s.
Sad news. My dad got me Lego Mindstorms (the $200 original set) when I was in 5th or 6th grade. It was one of those toys that is so addicting, while also getting you exposed to science, engineering, and computers. I used it for a year and had my fun; I didn't think about it for years after, but it was probably why I ended up joining the Robotics Club in high school. Also probably why I picked up programming classes in college even though my major wasn't programming. I'm grateful to have been exposed to this wonderful, and limitless toy. I really hope the replacement product is as magical as this.
The differences between Robot Inventor and SPIKE Prime are pretty minimal and there's nothing stopping consumers from buying SPIKE Prime through LEGO Education other than simply being aware that the option exists.
Man, playing with Mindstorms is some of the most fun I’ve had as an adult. This announcement is a shame.
I spent some time going through all of their basic examples in Rust, which was just delightfully silly.
I was given a Lego RCX kit for Christmas in about 98 at the age of 12. It was my first exposure to “proper programming” with its visual flowchart based language (I was already playing around with HTML). I spent days building various inventions with that set. It very much set me in the path I’m still on today.
I’m sure someone will come out with a new product range that fills that gap. My eldest kid is 8, I was planing to introduce her to Mindstorms in the next year or so…
It’s a shame but I can see how it’s a harder sell than the nth iteration of a scene from say Harry Potter.
IMhO, they could do well by combining programmable elements with thematic sets, say add programmable motion to a haunted house. They have already tip-toed down this path, eg. the roller coaster has an optional motor function. However the pure approach of Mindstorm clearly has too narrow a market.
They aren’t discontinuing it because its hard to sell in that space. They are retiring it in favor of their newer offering in the space (LEGO Education Spike Prime). They also have, for programmable robotics, the younger-kid focussed LEGO Boost. Plus they have at least one DUPLO set aimed at what I think of as the “tactile coding toy” space (where instructions are represented as physical configurations of objects), DUPLO Coding Express.
They are dropping the non-Edu line, as parent was talking about.
Exactly and it’s a quite obvious that if it sold well it wouldn’t have been dropped. Edu is a completely different market (for better and worse).
(We also have Boost but it’s much more limited IMO - my biggest gribe is that LEGO has so many incompatible systems which is ironic)
This is really sad. NXT-G was my first programming language. Not sure if I’d be the same person I am today without that experience.
What a shame, I loved my set as a kid. Hopefully the software will still work or can be made to work with now-discontinued models.
I had this nightmare vision where children "program" a robot by showing it's electronic eye a schematic representation of it's desired motion and/or reactions, from the manual, and the on-board AI converts the image into a working program. Although now that I write it out, it's perhaps not very nightmarish.
This is sad news. I hoarded a bunch of lego mindstorms and other robot sets over the news as my kids are still young. I cracked open a littlebits set (the star wars one) and was very dissapointed that the app that goes with it was removed from the app store.
My investment in a bunch of these devices will be devalued a lot :(
For me the Mindstorms failed at updates and could not work despite heroic customer service that did not include a refund. They are not a tech company and can not do tech.
Since then I've proven that things like ESP32 Arduino etc actually work to teach small kids real robotics. Mindstorms was always a gimmick.
In my opinion they tried to hard to make it easy.
The scratch-like interface is a nice idea but limited and probably expensive for LEGO to create and maintain.
They should have gone the Arduino direction and made it so that you could run Python or C++ directly on the bricks.
Kids are smarter than they get credit for, it’d work great!
FWIW you can run Linux on the EV3 and access the sensors and motors using a variety of programming languages.
Well, good riddance, I guess. The software side of this product has been completely mismanaged and community-hostile for a long time, and the hardware has always been overpriced.
Hopefully this will make market room for alternatives that give better value for money for STEM kids.
Does anybody remember any of the Mindstorms flash games on the old Lego game website? Those were pretty great. I especially liked the game where you tracked the spies in the vaguely Eastern European city of Telgrade.
The robot inventor set is awesome. Such a shame to see it being retired. :(
Really wanted a 2nd set of Robot Inventor, and now it's both discontinued and sold out everywhere. Ugh.
They are currently hiring engineers to build their new API services and event-based systems.
Sure, they are ending a particular line - but not the concept. It's just moving more to the cloud I guess.
Hopefully this is simply a rebranding to allow code and robotics into any line of Lego set. The market for simple Lego robots can only grow over time as they continue to drop in cost.
Honestly, Lego Mindstorms are the main reason why I love computers and engineering. I owe a tremendous amount to those formative years well spent building away with my legos.
Looks like https://pybricks.com/ is a usable alternative firmware for the Robot Inventor hub.
They released a new generation not long ago (last year?). Sounded like it wasn't warmly received initially but later they were sold out. Something to do with that?
Can anyone here recommend the best entry point into robotics for adults? Is Spike a good product, or too kid focused? Background is that I'm a software engineer.
Buy an EV3 kit (maybe at a reduced cost) and flash micropython onto the brick.
I am wondering if it has to do with chip shortages and supply chain issues, due to that I can imagine that the current offering became unsustainable.
I love that LEGO made both the schematics and firmware source code downloadable for Mindstorms 2 and EV3
Is limited app support a problem anymore? I assume there are complete replacements for the firmware these days?
Yes, you can run a debian based distro on them, so they can be programmed in Python or whatever. I guess the question is if they will stop being supported by platforms such as Scratch, which is a very popular way to program them these days
Far out, thanks
Bummer, I remember loving the system when was on the school Botball team in the early 2000s.
So this means it is only a matter of time before my LEGO Mindstorm sets are bricked?
I'm very sad... I did my engineering thesis with a Lego Mindstorms on 2009
They should open source the software so it will be supported by the community.
Community doesn't need a corpo for basic electronics.
I always preferred the Gilbert erector sets.
I'm pretty sure I had this as a kid. It had very memorable stamped steel girders . I think we built some sort of ferris wheel (not sure which exact model) and I was really unhappy with how slow/weak it was. it was a real depressing moment. Never quite forgot it. Took a good three and half decades before I finally learned how to make high torque spinning things (motor torque got better, easier, and cheaper).
Erector was discontinued before Mindstorms were launched, and were not programmable.
Mecanno brand has programmable robots, but not the range of sensors that Mindstorms had.
You can still buy them secondhand.
I don't know about Mecano, but the Erector sets online are in pretty sad condition, unsurprising since they're >50 years old now.
Sometimes I'll get from ebay one of the battered metal boxes they came in. They make nice nostalgic decorations.
The most easily available Meccano-compatible system still in production is the Swiss brand Stokys: https://www.stokys.ch/de-ch/home/
The web site and order system is in German, but I've been able to talk to their friendly customer service in English. Then there's the matter of shipping outside of Europe... but it's still much easier than scraping parts together from vintage Meccano vendors with circa-1995-style web sites.
I remember having some Erector sets as a kid in the '90s (they had merged with Meccano long before, and the choice of which brand to appear on which set seems to have been random since then), but these days the official Meccano/Erector selection is almost non-existent -- there are maybe a dozen small self-contained model vehicle kits, and you can't order generic kits or parts in bulk. It is rather sad -- these brands were once used for serious engineering prototyping and scientific work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser#Use_of_M...
Here in Argentina, Meccano-branded sets are still being made, but Meknex may be a better option: https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-855738684-meknex-k1...
The official Meccano-brand sets here in Argentina are indeed very limited.
Erector sets were incredible, as a kid I built RC cars out of those with some over-powered motors and such. Super fun times.
I would guess Mindstorms gives more of an intro to programming, while Erector is better for mechanical engineering.
(also, hey! I was that weird kid at Handmade Seattle last year who asked to shake your hand :) )
I'd attach Cox engines to them <g>.
It was a pleasure to meet you!
P.S. My mom told me that I couldn't handle the tiny screws used to put the Erector sets together. She was wrong :-) I spent endless hours building things with it.
I bought three big Meccano kits on closeout years ago. They lie in wait for robotification. If anyone has pointers to how to bring them to life with appropriately-sized motors and batteries and remote control, I'd be grateful.
What!! Nooo!
Shame on Lego!
End of an era
Lego is similar to Nint€ndo and Di$ney, they do not support the free culture, instead their lawers fight agains to free software projects or charity events.
Any educational tool/toy must be public domain or free license.
What if this kind of thinking would lead to no Legos at all?
There's always K'Nex.